Richard Spencer is one of the Daily Telegraph's Middle East correspondents. Married with three children, he was previously news editor, and then China correspondent for six years. He is based in Cairo.

China

How seriously should we take the story claiming that the People's Liberation Army has hacked into Pentagon computers? Including the system used by Robert Gates, the US defence secretary (as we continue to call him, rather than defense, even if we have long since called this place Beijing rather than Peking)?

Robert Gates' pc was hacked

Oddly, even the FT, which first reported the story yesterday, seemed todownplay it, in the editorial it ran on the matter:Â

"Indeed, such are the Beijing government's efforts to control the activities of its citizens on the internet that any hackers operating from China are almost certainly working for the authorities. Yet it is probably also right to assume that the US and other western governments are busy infiltrating the computer systems of foreign governments. It is therefore disingenuous to complain too vigorously when those same foreign governments become good at doing it back."

This is becoming a classic way of responding to these stories: if what they are doing to us we are also trying to do to them it can't really be a story, can it?

The American online magazine Salon takes what I call meta-journalism conspiracy theory based on this principle to a new level in response to the FT story.Â

"U.S. military routinely hacks into Chinese networks – Why wasn't that the headline on a 'scoop' detailing Chinese infiltration of Pentagon computers?" it asks.

By analysing the use of language, the author claims to prove that FT is indulging in "rhetorical alarmism", because the paragraph above says that the Chinese are hackers (a pejorative word) while the west is merely infiltrating, which is presumably a non-pejorative word.

This is surely nonsensical. In fact this whole approach is nonsensical, unless you read a moral/ethical concern into the FT's story which it conspicuously avoids – the idea that it is really, really bad of the Chinese to hack at the Pentagon.

Although the editorial said it would be disingenuous to complain, I'm not sure anyone was.

The key point of the story is not that the Chinese are doing it, but that they have been successful – they managed to get round a block put up by the Pentagon deliberately to stop them, and, according to one source, find a way potentially to disrupt the system.

That's important because of the Chinese strategy of asymmetric warfare: it can't take on the Americans face-to-face (it doesn't have aircraft carriers, Stealth bombers, etc) but it can attack where it hurts.

Since the American military is so computer dependent – all those smart bombs and so on – the weak point is their command-and-control networks.

This is the same reason that their knocking out of a satellite in December was important – where would the American military be without their satellites?

No-one's saying it's per se evil of the Chinese to be doing this, except I guess those who believe that America has a divine right to world leadership and that China is by definition wrong to try to catch up (and, curiously, the Chinese government which regards hacking as "immoral", even if done by itself).Â But it's important to be aware of their capabilities.

Oddly, the very fact of American military superiority means that the equivalence argument – they're doing it, we're doing it, so who cares? – doesn't work.

Chinese military planning is far less disruptable than American military planning because it's far less networked. I'm told that field telephones still play a big part in Chinese exercises. Can you hack a field telephone in Pudong from the Pentagon?

Rather more significant is this point: a really advanced hacker hacks without being noticed. So unless the hackers who got into the Pentagon (and German and British ministry websites recently) wanted to be found, to make some sort of point – and it's hard to see why that should be – maybe the PLA is not so sophisticated as it might appear at first sight.